Sweating through Socal’s extreme weather: Tim Rutten

In England and Ireland, where I’ve spent a good bit of time, personal reserve is valued in a way it probably never was here, and so weather is the safest as well the most frequent conversational topic — neutral ground on which one can appear courteous without straying into the embarrassingly and unforgivably intimate. I’ve always found that a bit of a marvel because, nine out of 10 times, it’s either raining or about to rain there. Otherwise, there’s fog.

Even so, while I value suffering in silence as much as the average repressed Irish Catholic male, put me firmly in the let’s-talk-about-the-weather camp — and there’s no better place to do it than Southern California, which contrary to popular belief is a region of extreme weather. (Having a “Mediterranean climate” doesn’t mean the weather never changes; it just means it seldom gets very cold.)

The current siege of heat and humidity, for example, may be wretchedly uncomfortable, but what’s that compared to its boundless conversational possibilities? It’s fascinating, for example, to note that those who haven’t already been laid low by heat stroke or just succumbed to the mute, uncomprehending misery of dumb brutes, seem divided on what afflicts us: In one camp are those who smugly ascribe our current torment to unarrested climate change and in the other those, resistant to any change on principle and viscerally suspicious of science, who insist Southern California always has had wacky weather. In other words, even the weather has been politicized: In this, as in all else, we’re a state divided between red and blue.

Actually, this is one of those cases where there’s a bit of truth on both sides.

Because agriculture — particularly the citrus industry — has played such a crucial part in our history, we’re blessed with unusually detailed temperature records, and they show that, for California as a whole, the average temperatures have risen by around 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. The greatest increases have occurred in Southern California and the Central Valley. Moreover, if the current heat is just too much, you might want to consider relocating to Oregon, because it looks like there’s more of the same on the way.

UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability recently used a super computer to create the first climate forecasting model able to take into account this region’s incredibly complex geography of coastal canyons, mountain ranges, deserts and densely populated urban areas. They then used the model to forecast temperatures for microclimates measuring just 2¼ square miles each. The model found that, by 2041, downtown Los Angeles will have three times as many days each year where the temperature tops 95 degrees as it does now. The San Fernando Valley will have four times as many, while the High Desert regions will endure a fivefold increase.

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Perhaps worse, the region’s hottest days will grow hotter and most existing records will fall. To understand what that means, consider that eight of the 10 hottest days ever recorded occurred over the past decade. In fact, L.A.’s all-time downtown record was set during just the sort of September heat wave we’re suffering through now. That was on Sept. 27, 2010, when the mercury hit 113 degrees in the Civic Center. Demand for the Department of Water and Power’s electricity hit an historic high of 6,177 megawatts. If that gives you pause, consider that our elaborate, expensive and badly stretched water system was planned and constructed during a century that climatologists now believe was anomalously wet and where our climate was, by historic standards, unusually stable.

Here’s where the our-weather-always-has-been-wacky side of the conversation has a point. Acceptance of the scientific realities that undergird climate change predictions shouldn’t preclude recognition of just how volatile Southern California’s supposedly benevolent climate always has been. Paleo-biologists, for instance, now know that during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly that extended from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD this region went through repeated and prolonged droughts of a severity unknown in our time. Some of them lasted more than 100 years. What followed 1300 was what’s called The Little Ice Age that ushered long periods of dramatically increased moisture. The century in which our current urban civilization was established benefited by being on the tail end of that epoch.

As miserable as our current weather is, merciful memory seems to have spared us the recollection of just how much of it there’s been over the past decades, which rather undercuts the argument that it’s all attributable to accelerating climate change. (On the other hand, it may indicate that man-assisted change has been insidiously under way for much longer than we realized until lately. Take your pick.) In late September of 1939, for example, eight people died when Los Angeles suffered through seven consecutive days when the Downtown temperature hit 100 degrees or more. Santa Ana conditions in 1961 pushed the mercury in L.A. to 105 degrees on Oct. 14 and, in 1987, it was 108 degrees Downtown on Oct. 3 and 4. In 1997, a September heat wave very much like the one now in progress killed five people and in that same month in 2007, six fatalities were attributed to a monsoonal flow of humidity coupled with high temperatures.

Historically, by the way, Southern California’s worst disasters on a per capita economic basis were neither earthquakes nor wildfires — the latter always have been such a fact of life here that the seeds of many shrubs in our chaparral zone don’t even germinate unless they’re burned over.

The worst natural disaster in our history actually was a flood: In 1862, the sky opened in late December and, over the next month, 35 inches of rain fell. The San Gabriel and Inland valleys were lakes. The Ballona wetlands extended from San Pedro to about where Martin Luther King Boulevard in South L.A. is today. An inland sea formed to depths of four feet where the Santa Ana River enters Orange County. The cattle industry on which Southern California’s economy then depended collapsed and, when their herds drowned, the land-holders couldn’t pay their taxes, which led to the breakup of the great Spanish land grant ranchos. On Jan. 4, 1913, a three-night freeze set in across Southern California, pushing nighttime temperatures down to 18 degrees. The cold spell devastated the lucrative citrus industry on which the region then depended. By the end of the year, the population of Redlands fell by 50 percent and for-sale signs went up on withered groves across the region.

Our weather may not be the mild creature myth and memory have made it out to be, but it always gives us something to talk about.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. Ruttencolumn@gmail.com